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The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water
The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water
The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water
Audiobook13 hours

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

Written by Charles Fishman

Narrated by Stephen Hoye

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

The water coming out of your tap is four billion years old and might have been slurped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We will always have exactly as much water on Earth as we have ever had. Water cannot be destroyed, and it can always be made clean enough for drinking again. In fact, water can be made so clean that it actually becomes toxic.

As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this delightful narrative excursion, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, which is both the promise and the peril of our unexplored connections to it. Taking listeners from the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las Vegas, and from a rice farm in the Australian outback to a glimpse into giant vats of soup at Campbell's largest factory, he reveals that our relationship to water is conflicted and irrational, neglected and mismanaged. Whether we will face a water scarcity crisis has little to do with water and everything to do with how we think about water-how we use it, connect with it, and understand it.

Portraying and explaining both the dangers-in 2008, Atlanta came just ninety days from running completely out of drinking water-and the opportunities, such as advances in rainwater harvesting and businesses that are making huge breakthroughs in water productivity, The Big Thirst will forever change the way we think about water, our crucial relationship to it, and the creativity we can bring to ensuring we always have plenty of it.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 12, 2011
ISBN9781452670782
Author

Charles Fishman

Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller One Giant Leap, A Curious Mind (with Brian Grazer), The Wal-Mart Effect, and The Big Thirst. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism.

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Reviews for The Big Thirst

Rating: 4.041666666666667 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Big Thirst is a mostly-fascinating outline of the way water is taken for granted in the west, and how that lackadaisical attitude - and the readily available fresh water it's premised on - cannot last. It does get a little repetitive and bogged down in places, but regularly picks back up with interesting tidbits and case studies. My favourite part of the book was unfortunately the shortest - the beginning, where Fishman details just what water _is_ exactly, where it comes from, and why it's here on Earth. I felt like every paragraph sparked a new revelation - water is amazing! - and I could have read a whole book like that. However, it's just a framing device; the bulk of the novel is built around case studies of urban water use and misuse ranging from Pennsylvania to rural India. Three main areas make up the case studies: Australia, arid Las Vegas, and the large cities of India. All of whom grapple with different, in some cases very interesting, challenges with water. This section was mostly hit but there were some misses - and an unmistakeable sense of padding. Fishman has a tendency to repeat himself a little with the case studies, and his attempts at "I am there" journalism (not a favourite of mine) favour atmospherics over facts. This was especially apparent in the pages devoted to framing Toowoomba's water debate; a very slight and boring recap of Galveston's hurricane challenges; and summarising the previous career of Las Vegas Water's head honcho. But don't let these sections put you off - for every weak case study, there's several fascinating ones. Especially interesting to me was the section on India. I knew nothing about municipal water arrangements in India, and the challenges - and solutions - were really engaging. It helps that there was not much padding in it as well. Indeed, for a large book, I was left feeling... thirsty for more information about water and the myriad ways we treat it. Fishman's journey elides Africa and Europe entirely, where I'm sure there would be equally intriguing stories. You could read that as a criticism, but really it's a compliment - Fishman succeeded in making me invested in the topic.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It just was not a book's worth of material. I found the constant repetitions of flowery equivalents to 'water is cool, and important' to be tedious reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The most profound statement made in the book: We do not have a water shortage. After reading this book, I understand that statement fully. While water is not created nor destroyed on this planet (that we know of), the public tends to define the water crisis as a lack of water. The amount of water is constant. Each locale, as the book examples the independence of water communities, must immediately and, in some cases, drastically rethink the way water is used and sourced. Water can remain with people; people cannot remain with water.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everything about water – the history, science, and the future. Focuses on successful water managers and what they have done and the challenges ahead for all of us. Fascinating!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everyone ought to read this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author visits a number of places to talk about how they use water.One example is Las Vegas, NV. This city is set in the driest area of the US. Its water is supplied out of Lake Mead, which, at least until this year, has been steadily drying up. Thus they have had to learn a whole new way of dealing with water, paying people to tear out their lawns, pumping treated wastewater back into the lake, outlawing car washing, etc.Other examples of places the author has visited are Toowoomba and Perth in Australia, Atlanta, New Delhi and Mumbai in India, and a microchip plant in Vermont.This is a very well-written book. The examples the author has chosen to illustrate his points are very instructive. In the end, he calls for a new look at how we use and pay for water. We tend to take our water systems for granted in the west, and underinvest in them assuming the water will always be there. The result, a few years down the road, could be conflicts and shortages. A harbinger of this is the conflict between Georgia, Florida and Alabama over the Chattahoochee River and the water in Lake Lanier. India is an extreme example of this. When the British left in 1947, it had good modern municipal water systems. Nowadays, because of a lack of attention, its water systems only provide water a small part of the time, and the water they do provide is contaminated and completely undrinkable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very thorough and impressive book about the truly stupendous amount of uses of water, and how it may be conserved and reused more efficiently in our lives. Invariably one of the most important topics of humanity's future.